Dr. Martin Pfaller
Assistant Professor
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Yale University
Thursday September 18, 2025; 11am-12pm; AUST 445
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Abstract: Heart‐failure prevalence in the US exceeds 6 million people, underscoring the need for better tools to predict, prevent, and reverse disease progression. This talk will present a new multi-scale growth and remodeling (G&R) framework, spanning tissue turnover and organ-scale biomechanics. A key conceptual advance is to recast cardiac G&R as a stability problem: loading changes can lead either to a new compensated equilibrium or runaway maladaptation. In this talk, students will learn about cardiac physiology, constrained mixture theory of G&R, and computational biomechanics.
Biography: Martin Pfaller is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Yale University. He graduated with a B.Sc. (2012), M.Sc. (2013), and Ph.D. (2019) from the Technical University of Munich, Germany, working with Prof. Wolfgang Wall. He was a Postdoc (2019-2022) and Instructor (2022-204) at Stanford University in Pediatric Cardiology working with Prof. Alison Marsden. He is a recipient of the NIH Pathway to Independence Award (K99/R00). His research group specializes in the computational modeling of the heart and cardiovascular system. He develops numerical methods for simulating the biomechanical behavior of heart tissue, the fluid dynamics of blood flow, and the long-term adaptation of tissue. His work has applications in diagnosing, understanding, and predicting the progression of cardiovascular diseases.
Paper to review: A homogenized constrained mixture model of cardiac growth and remodeling: analyzing mechanobiological stability and reversal
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For additional information, please contact Dr. Visar Ajeti or Darcy Richard
